Bluesky now displays replies by ‘hotness’

Bluesky replies will now default to appear by “hotness” in a contentious update to the social media platform.

Announced this week as part of the app’s 1.95 software update, post replies will now appear as “hot replies first”, which is the new default setting. “With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily,” the app’s official Bluesky account posted.

Post reply settings also include sorting by oldest or newest replies, most liked, or a random setting labelled “Poster’s roulette”.

But while Bluesky’s announcement was delivered with excitement, a lot of users aren’t happy with the addition, especially as it’s now the default setting. Users protested the act of rewarding “clout farmers” and lamented this similarity to platforms like X — where many Bluesky users have fled from.

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“Prioritising ‘popular’ like this is one of the main reasons all the other social media sites became awful and encourages shitty behaviour,” wrote Phonogram author and illustrator Jamie McKelvie.

If you want to change your default setting from “hot replies first,” you can switch the setting within Thread Preferences — go to Settings, then Content and Media, then Thread Preferences.

Bluesky is experiencing more growing pains than reply mechanics, despite recently passing the 20 million-user mark. Reports of the platform scraping a million public Bluesky posts to train AI haven’t been ideal optics for the alternative to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and Meta’s Threads. However, engagement on the platform has already been celebrated as feeling better than X, especially due to its customisable algorithm model, opt-in Feed types, and growing stan support.

Mashable’s Chris Taylor dug into just what Bluesky can learn from its competitors, for better or worse.